A variety of wireless data processing devices have been introduced over the past several years. These include wireless personal digital assistants (“PDAs”) such as the Palm® VIIx handheld, cellular phones equipped with data processing capabilities (e.g., those which include wireless application protocol (“WAP”) support), and, more recently, wireless messaging devices such as the Blackberry™ wireless pager developed by Research In Motion (“RIM™”).
In implementing features into a wireless messaging device, many times the features are based on a current implementation of state of the art applications. However, in many cases, improvements can be made over the current state of the art implementation.
In current messaging and scheduling applications, such as Microsoft Outlook™ or Lotus Notes™, when a meeting or other event is to occur in the calendar, a pop-up reminder is delivered to the user of the application to inform them of an upcoming meeting or event. This reminder may show up at some pre-determined amount of time prior to the meeting or event. The user then may either dismiss the pop-up reminder or ask it to remind the user again at a later time (i.e., “snooze”).
A problem with the pop-up reminder is that the user must immediately decide how to dispose of the reminder. Once the user makes their determination the reminder is gone. The only way to access the information associated with the reminder is to navigate to the calendar in the scheduling portion of the application and find the relevant meeting or event entry to determine any details the user seeks. On a wireless device, where screen real estate is at a premium, such cumbersome navigation can be time-consuming and inefficient.